Free Markets, Free People

One of the things I and others have been saying for years is the biggest influence on our climate (and temperature) hangs in the sky each day and we call “the Sun”. Anthony Watts has a post up today talking about what is going on with the Sun and what that may mean for global temperatures. The process, as I have come to understand it is activity on the Sun (sun spots) generate solar winds (sun’s magnetic field). Solar winds have a tendency to “blow” away cosmic rays and keep them from reaching earth. When cosmic rays reach earth they react with water vapor in our atmosphere and create clouds. Clouds then block sunlight. Heavy cloud cover means cooler temperatures. Light cloud cover means higher temperatures. As I further understand it, none of that is included in climate models.

Well, if Svensmark is right, and Galactic Cosmic Rays modulated by the sun’s magnetic field make a change in cloud cover on Earth, increasing it during low solar magnetic activity, we are in for some colder times.

There’s a presentation by Jasper Kirkby, CLOUD Spokesperson, CERN, which shows what we currently know about the correlations between Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR’s) and variations in the climate.

The CLOUD experiment uses a cloud chamber to study the theorized link between GCR’s and cloud formation in Earth’s atmosphere. Kirkby talks about the results from the first CLOUD experiment and the new CLOUD experiment and what it will deliver on the intrinsic connection between GCR’s and cloud formation. This is from the Cern, one of Europe’s most highly respected centers for scientific research.

The sun is in a funk – has been for years. Some of the lowest activity every recorded. And what has been happening here? Recorded temperatures have been cooling. Perhaps the funniest (in a sad sort of thing) thing I’ve read are the so-called climate scientists who were lamenting their inability to explain why their models weren’t reflecting this cooling trend and wishing they could explain it.

Look at the charts on Watts’ site, read about the lack of activity on the sun, understand the relationship between activity, solar winds, cosmic rays and clouds and you’ll understand that this is high school science we’re talking about.

Now go read this, especially the commenter’s remarks highlighted in the article, and much of what is going on becomes considerably clearer.

Which leaves me asking – again – how can such “science” that disregards the sun’s effect and raises an 800 year lagging effect (CO2) into a “cause” be taken seriously by intelligent and seemingly rational adults? Forget “consensus” and “conspiracy”. How did the Sun get ignored and CO2 changed from effect to “cause” in this hypothesis which can’t be reproduced?

Those of us who are familiar with this process and have seen it at work before (Rathergate) won’t be particularly surprised, but Richard Fernandez does a fascinating essay comparing the CRU scandal to differing civilization types, discussing the main difference between nomadic empires (Mongols) and more traditional ones (Rome) and how they are represented by the internet:

The story of these ancient empires acquires a renewed interest today because many of the conditions present in the vast, unsettled steppe superficially resemble the uncharted borders of the online world. In the 21st century just as in the 13th century, powerful ideological and economic forces move effortlessly across settled boundaries in ways that no single nation-state can easily control.

So, we have the Mongol Empire and the Roman Empire (a true “Barbarians At The Gate” scenario) opposing each other:

Whereas one side believes that government should be limited to tasks that the individual or local government cannot perform and that relationships between the parts are regulated by a distributed program expressed in the Constitution and Judaeo-Christian tradition, the other side believes that “government should be there for you”. It should be there for you in the bedroom, in the playground and recycle bin. It should be there when you are eating transfats or farting. It should even be your sexual mentor, where possible in school. Like every good imperative program, it should leave no room for anything but itself.

And, as Fernandez points out, the Romans almost won:

The endless proliferation of treaties, laws and regulations were the imperative rules; and their embodiment in a never-ending expanse of organs of governance from local governments to the UN — with NGOs and activist groups filling every conceivable gap — was the instrument by which the ungoverned were going to be fenced in. Even private life was brought under cultivation by slow degrees and a code of Political Correctness suffused every aspect of life. In time it would become impossible to even think a subversive thought; the language would be incapable of expressing it. The vast increase in government over the last sixty years brought the settlement of the world — some might call it the End of History — almost within reach.

But then Al Gore “invented” the internet, and the internet recreated the steppe on a virtual scale:

The “climate change” debate is almost a perfect example of intellectual combat between the two sides. It is a modernized re-enactment of a struggle between one side operating under distributed programming and another using a top-down paradigm. The construction of the “climate change” meme followed the traditional socialist pattern. The idea was built up with articles written about it in the press. Advocacy groups formed around it; authority from some academic source found to bolster it; celebrities were engaged to tout it. The UN was persuaded to give the whole its imprimatur. It had always worked before. Post after post was driven into the ground anchored around Kyoto, the UN and the EU. Strand after strand of wire was fastened to the timbers. And then, just as the gate was going to be closed, the nomads of the Internet charged the wire.

They have almost broken through. Led by individuals like Plimer, McIntyre and Lomborg and followed by a motely, a growing tide of discussion on the Internet has pushed in the wire so hard that it might actually collapse. The nomads looked at the data, the computer models. Someone may have hacked the CRU documents or leaked them. And once the data was out they knew where to look. The site Watts Up With That is a perfect example of the demolition of a staid University Department meme under the cut and thrust of the terrors of the intellectual steppes. Watts Up With That goes through one instance of the CRUs data fiddling in step-by-step detail and by the end it you have gone along for the ride. You have followed the process and find it impossible to simply say that “the CRU may have been naughty but the data is good”. The data itself may be bad or intentionally corrupted.

It is a fascinating spectacle. What the nomads have on their sides is reality. What the sown has on its part is manner and method. And the struggle between the two sides is one whose outcome, even in general, is still unknown.

The difference, of course, is the barbarians have been able to challenge the “method” and “manner” in which the statist side has used for seeming eons to get us to our present situation. To the swift, nimble and adaptable go the battles (assuming they also have the facts on their side as I believer the skeptics do in this climate scandal). The barbarians are able to mass at will, engage subject matter experts and tap their knowledge and erode the foundations of trust the empire has built up, falsely in many cases, over the years.

It is indeed a fascinating spectacle and one I feel thankful to both witness and participate in. I’ve always been the type that likes to question authority, and being an ad hoc member of this huge dissenting tribe has been most fulfilling and enjoyable. My question to you is, given what Fernandez puts forward here, do you think this may mark the high tide of this particular empire type or simply a pot hole in the road down which Leviathan continues to gather speed?

We have a broad agreement. Now I know that people are going to ask to be given every detail of this.

[…]

We have had a rule here for 40 years or however long we have been in existence, if you start talking about the plan and start shipping it around, it will be made public. And we want not that to be the case because we want to know the score before we start giving all the details even to our own members.

So you are not going to get answers to those questions.

[…]

As I have indicated, we can’t disclose the details of what we have done, but believe me we have got something that is good and that I think is very, for us, it moves this bill way down the road.

Fortunately, enough of the super-secret, whats-good-fer’ya plan has leaked out that some cogent analysis is possible. Cato’s Michael Tanner, for example, observed that the proposed legislation would basically replicate the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP), through which many government workers and Members of Congress get coverage, as well expand MediCare (and possibly MediCaid) to people as young as 55. He also notes several problems with this proposal:

A few reasons to believe this is yet another truly bad idea:

1. In choosing the FEHBP for a model, Democrats have actually chosen an insurance plan whose costs are rising faster than average. FEHBP premiums are expected to rise 7.9 percent this year and 8.8 percent in 2010. By comparison, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that on average, premiums will increase by 5.5 to 6.2 percent annually over the next few years. In fact, FEHBP premiums are rising so fast that nearly 100,000 federal employees have opted out of the program.
2. FEHBP members are also finding their choices cut back. Next year, 32 insurance plans will either drop out of the program or reduce their participation. Some 61,000 workers will lose their current coverage.
3. But former OPM director Linda Springer doubts that the agency has the “capacity, the staff, or the mission,” to be able to manage the new program. Taking on management of the new program could overburden OPM. “Ultimate, it would break the system.”
4. Medicare is currently $50-100 trillion in debt, depending on which accounting measure you use. Allowing younger workers to join the program is the equivalent of crowding a few more passengers onto the Titanic.
5. At the same time, Medicare under reimburses physicians, especially in rural areas. Expanding Medicare enrollment will both threaten the continued viability of rural hospitals and other providers, and also result in increased cost-shifting, driving up premiums for private insurance.
6. Medicaid is equally a budget-buster. The program now costs more than $330 billion per year, a cost that grew at a rate of roughly 10.7 percent annually. The program spends money by the bushel, yet under-reimburses providers even worse than Medicare.
7. Ultimately this so-called compromise would expand government health care programs and further squeeze private insurance, resulting in increased costs, result in higher insurance premiums, and provide a lower-quality of care.

Let’s be clear. The point of the health-care takeover was never to control costs, but to control the market. Obama and the Democrats are certain that they can transfer the money involved in every health care transaction from the provider/insurer side of the equation to the recipient side. In other words, they simply want to rearrange the entire transaction in a way that seems “fair” to the favored constituency. As long is doesn’t cost those people any more (for awhile at least) then actual costs don’t really matter.

That’s why they draft loss ratio provisions mandating insurers to pay out 85% of the premiums received in benefit claims (i.e. the companies can only “make” 15% over top of premium revenues, which percentage Congress assumes is mostly profit, and not going to overhead costs; most states set the loss ratio somewhere between 65% and 75%). And that’s also why Reid and his band of merry cohorts see fit to hitch the health care wagon to programs that are already money-losing. Accordingly, when the primary goal is simply control, actual costs become irrelevant except when making the sales pitch to a public weary of profligate government spending. Mix in some budget gimmicks (like starting the tax 3 or 4 years before actually beginning the program), and voila! You have a health care bill.

No matter what comes out of the Congress for Obama to sign, you can rest assured that it will (a) cost American taxpayers way more than is promised, and (b) further cede control over the market place to the government.

What in the world are the Senate Democrats thinking? Isn’t this supposed to be about “health care reform”? Apparently their idea of reform is to take a system that has trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities and expand it without ever addressing the underlying reason for the huge future debt?

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

But apparently winning the process (passing something called “health care reform”) has become more important than the original purpose of “reform”.

Now, it appears, negotiators are making headway to ensure that the [Medicare] expansion would take place at a far quicker pace than any proposed public option. According to the well-placed source, Democrats are rallying behind a proposal that would allow a portion of the 55-64 year old age group to buy in to the Medicare system as early as 2010. By contrast, a public plan for insurance coverage would not come into being until 2014.

That group which would get immediate access, of course, would the the high-risk group that will cost the most to treat.

In addition to debating a potential start date for a Medicare buy-in proposal, Senate Democrats are also in negotiations over who, exactly, should be allowed to qualify for the expanded Medicare program. At this juncture, it doesn’t appear that everyone in the 55-64-age bracket would be granted access. Negotiators are considering limiting consumers to those who would qualify for high-risk insurance pools already set up under the Senate’s health care legislation. This would mean primarily those who have been uninsured for a certain amount of time, have a history of poor health or are unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition. The Senate has already earmarked $5 billion for subsidies for this group to buy insurance and may increase that total to help them pay for Medicare coverage — should it become available to those under 65 and above 55 years of age.

Note that the subsidy is only to help this group buy insurance coverage under Medicare. It says nothing about the cost of that pool to Medicare. And, don’t forget, they’re cutting Medicare payments by $500 billion over then next 10 years.

Then, in 2014, they’re going to bring in the rest of that age group in total. And they’re going to tell you this will save money and “reform” health care?

* Medicare’s expected future obligations exceeded premiums and dedicated taxes by $89 trillion.
* In other words, Medicare’s liability is about 5 1/2 times the size of Social Security’s ($18 trillion) and about six times the size of the entire U.S. economy.
* Throw in Medicaid, and health care spending alone will crowd out every other thing the federal government is doing by mid-century, says Goodman.

Yet to date, other than a claim they’re going to cut that $500 billion out of it – a claim I’d be willing to bet never happens – there is no recognition of the huge unfunded liability nor the fact that these additions they’re “negotiating” will simply swell it even more.

* When today’s college students reach retirement (about 2054), Social Security alone will require a 16.6 percent payroll tax, one-third greater than today’s rate.
* When Medicare Part A is included, the payroll tax burden will rise to 25.7 percent – more than one of every four dollars workers will earn that year.
* If Medicare Part B (physician services) and Part D are included, the total Social Security/Medicare burden will climb to 37 percent of payroll by 2054 – one in three dollars of taxable payroll, and twice the size of today’s payroll tax burden!

Thus, more than one-third of the wages workers earn in 2054 will need to be committed to pay benefits promised under current law. That is before any bridges or highways are built and before any teachers’ or police officers’ salaries are paid.

That’s also before this latest hare-brained idea by the Democrats (adding another entire decade’s worth of people to Medicare).

Look, you don’t have to be a Harvard PhD to figure this out (in fact, it appears it’s better if you’re not). We are being again sold further down an unsustainable river by a bunch of yahoos who seemingly have no cognizance of the detrimental future impact of what they’re proposing.

Between the promises they’ve made with Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, we’ll be broke before you know it:

* By 2020, in addition to payroll taxes and premiums, Social Security and Medicare will require more than one in four federal income tax dollars.
* By 2030, about the midpoint of the baby boomer retirement years, the programs will require nearly half of all income tax dollars.
* By 2060, they will require nearly three out of four income tax dollars.

And instead of fixing this, they’re now talking about adding to it and making it worse? If you need a picture (this is primarily for those Harvard PhDs who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the nonsense that’s being proposed) here you go:

This is the mess the Democrats are “enthusiastic” about adding on too with trillions more in unfunded liabilities without addressing the necessary reform to “bend the cost curve down”. It is, in the truest sense, generational theft. It is unacceptable. It is obviously unaffordable and, unfortunately, they don’t seem smart enough to realize that.

This is an outrage and they need to know that they are so far afield on this that they’ve lost site of the goal – reform which makes health care more affordable. This monstrosity just gets more expensive as they “negotiate”.

Richard Epstein, writing in Forbes, has some very unkind but deserved words for President Obama’s panel of economic advisers and specifically, Christina Romer.

The recent “upbeat” news is that the level of unemployment has leveled off at about 10% after its earlier climb this year. And just what has been the role of his professional advisors in the sorry performance of the last 10 months? To tell, it appears, the president exactly what he and his political advisors want to hear.

He points to Romer’s recent WSJ editorial:

Exhibit A is Christina Romer’s recent Wall Street Journal column, “Putting Americans Back to Work.” Romer heads the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Her column rates as a bit of transparent propaganda that belongs in a fan magazine, not a serious newspaper. If she wrote it of her own volition, she should be fired for economic incompetence. If, as seems more likely, the White House wrote it for her, or told her just what to say, she should resign in protest.

If, over the past 10 months, you’ve had the growing feeling (or realization) that we’re now into politics 2.0 and the entire administrative organization is committed to propagandizing and politicizing everything, I’d say you’re right. Oh certainly past administrations have been guilty of some measure of that, but not to the level we’re seeing it now – to the point that it is so obvious that it must be commented upon by usually dispassionate economic analysts.

For instance, Epstein says:

Her column contains nine awestruck references to presidential omniscience and benevolence. Its opening sally places all the blame on the Bush administration, by claiming that Obama took office at “the height of the worst downturn since the great depression.” Funny that she failed to mention the tumultuous events of September and October 2008 had cooled off before then. Nor, of course, did Obama “stop the economic free fall” in those tempestuous autumn days, unless Moses also parted the Red Sea.

Worse still, she blindly celebrates Obama’s worst economic blunders as his greatest triumphs. The $787 billion stimulus package in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a bust. Its protectionist “Buy American” provisions remain a perpetual irritant to international trade. The warped Cash for Clunkers program created a short bubble via a massive public giveaway, while doing nothing to help the environment.

Why, one might ask, with all these supposedly farsighted maneuvers on the books, does the president still face a “weak” employment market? Romer offers no explanation for how Obama’s wise decisions made matters worse. Instead she hyped Obama’s inconclusive meeting with various community leaders that took place the next day.

Or, as he says, propaganda and cheerleading. Is this what we expect from so-called economic experts advising the president? Is there any wonder that unemployment stands at 10% after these same advisers told the president that the “stimulus” would hold it at 8%?

Why aren’t they, instead, advising the president to do those things that government can do that actually would spur employment? Is it because they are as political as the rest of the administration? If not, why would competent economists address unemployment like this:

High on its agenda was an investigation of public-private partnerships that could, at best, only usher in yet another round of economic gimmicks. No credible economist could think that “direct incentives of homeowners to retrofit their homes to improve energy efficiency” could place a dent in the ranks of the 15.4 million unemployed. Far more likely is a replay of the older story: subsidies for these programs sop up wealth and thus kill sensible job opportunities elsewhere.

Or, playing to the political agenda even when it is ineffective in doing what really needs to be done – square peg/round hole.

What they ought to be saying the president is either being left unsaid or being ignored. The reason will be obvious:

You can only improve labor markets by freeing them up. Scrap the talk about goofy ad hoc subsidies, and tell the president, for the first time in his life, to think hard about deregulation. Roll back the three recent minimum-wage increases that have blunted job creation for low-skilled workers in a stagnant labor market. Announce he will veto any effort by Congress to pass the Employer Free Choice Act, whose uncertain threat of compulsory unionization has prompted many businesses to shelve any plans for expansion. Abandon the monstrous health care bills winding through Congress, whose panoply of taxes, subsidies and regulations are job killers of the first magnitude. Put a halt on legislation for carbon caps and taxes until the science gets sorted out. Don’t let the EPA make a hasty endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.

Deregulation costs nothing to administer, increases jobs and adds to the tax base. It is only an added benefit that sound economics reduces presidential power.

Those are all things government can do now, and, they’re all things which would spur economic activity and employment. And they are all things that, politically, go completely against the agenda of the Democrats and the President. And, apparently, they go unspoken by his so-called Council of Economic Advisers.

The people are poorly served when politics seeps into every layer of an administration. Political survival becomes the foremost priority. Those whose job it is to credibly and ethically serve a president and thereby the people, fail in their duty when they become mere propaganda tools of an agenda. When the “advise”, for instance, of an economic panel is driven by politics and a desire to support an agenda rather than by a real desire to serve the best interests of the country, they fail in the inherent duty their position demands and even worse, they fail public’s trust. Being a credible adviser doesn’t mean always saying yes to the agenda, something this present bunch could apparently afford to learn and learn quickly.

For the past decade or so, it’s been generally believed that global temperatures have at least leveled off, if not slightly cooled. That doesn’t make it true, but using the old eyes-ears-and-nose test has convinced most people that the 00’s were generally less warm than the 90’s.

Thankfully, we have scientists who keep track of these things for us. Of course, when temperatures don’t do what certain scientists expect them to do, we get expressions of confusion like the following (emphasis added):

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

That, of course, is from the infamous leaked Climate-Gate emails. It’s written by Kevin Trenberth who was commiserating with his fellow CRU scientists just a few weeks ago in October about how gosh darn cool its been, contrary to what their AGW models predicted. Not to be outdone by mere facts, Trenberth hopefully offers “the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Well never fear, dear Kevin, for the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization has your back!

The first decade of this century is “by far” the warmest since instrumental records began, say the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization.

Their analyses also show that 2009 will almost certainly be the fifth warmest in the 160-year record.

The US space agency Nasa suggests that a new global temperature record will be set “in the next one or two years”.

World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Met Office scientists have been giving details of the new analysis at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

The WMO said global temperatures were 0.44C (0.79F) above the long-term average.

“We’ve seen above average temperatures in most continents, and only in North America were there conditions that were cooler than average,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.

“We are in a warming trend – we have no doubt about it.”

“Only” North America saw cooling? Pfft, who cares about that piddly little place and its historically superior instrumentation and methods of recording temperature? Or anyplace else that doesn’t fit the warmist model? It’s not like “Global Warming” means it’s actually global or anything. So just ignore all that and concentrate on what’s important here: the planet is boiling, people! DON’T YOU SEE THAT!!!!1!ONE!oNe

Before getting too cozy with that MET pronouncement, however, one might want to do a little data integrity check. Y’know, just to be sure we’re going to wreck the world’s economy for a good reason.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything funny going here. It could just be an honest mistake, and maybe the planet (minus certain sections that are inconvenient to this narrative) really is sizzling away. After all, it’s not like they “adjusted” the temperatures to account … er, for something or other … resulting in a temperature chart that shows and unmistakable trend ever-upward.

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. What made up that strange average shown in Fig. 7? I started at zero with the earliest record. Here is Station Zero at Darwin, showing the raw and the homogenized versions.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

Oh … hmmm …. well, then. There you have it. CAN’T YOU SEE THE WARMING!?!?!?

Of course, don’t expect the MSM to alert you to any of these little glitches, or when they eventually get “fixed”. The media will be too busy chasing down Tiger’s mistresses and copying press releases from the Copenhagen Screw The World Climate Conference. They’ve got priorities you know.

UPDATE: Well thank goodness somebody is doing some actual science to get to the bottom of all this rampant warming around (certain, strategically located parts of) the world:

The Australian has an article out today highlighting two recent peer-reviewed (as if that has any credibility anymore) studies which disprove AGW. Both are studies of planet Earth, not buggy SW models with biased data meant to produce the desired result. They are empirical (measured), not theoretical (SWAG – a.k.a. scientifically based wild ass guess).

The first is from the historic CO2 record, and how it was many times hire than today over a period of hundreds of thousands of years WHILE THE EARTH COOLED DRASTICALLY!

Pearson’s work contains a couple of remarkable results.

First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days.

…

Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

CO2 levels 3-4 times present day levels, and the result was global cooling. The UN believes only modest increases will cause out of control warming. But if it did not happen before at much higher levels -why not? Simple – the theory of CO2 as a green house feed back mechanism on a global scale is false (it never has been proven scientifically at the global level). Earth is much more complicated than the alarmists could possibly imagine.

The second study is from 3o years of satellite data … So here is the result of measuring planet Earth from space:

Building on a methodology published 15 years ago in Nature, climatologist and NASA medallist John Christy and colleague David Douglass studied global temperature impacts of volcanic activity and ocean-atmospheric oscillations (the “El Nino” effect) and separated these from global temperature trends over the past 28 years.

[…]

The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position.

The result was published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment and the paper has not yet been challenged in the scientific literature.

What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.

Again, no runaway feedback from CO2. This is not a SW model – as the article notes. This is not clumsy or exaggerated statistical mysticism. This is measuring reality and learning what is happening.

This is real science, with small error bars.

Well, now that can’t be right. As Trenberth said, the data must be wrong.

So this can all be ignored then since it doesn’t actually have anything to do with fancy modeling that predicts, er, nothing very well really. But those models do prove, in a complicated consensusy way that you peons shouldn’t concern yourself with, that we’re getting warmer! All the time. Up, up, UP!

Now back to the limos. These citizens aren’t going to rule themselves!

Incredible projection on view in an article by George Monbiot today. If you’re not familiar with Monbiot, he’s been a leading supporter of AGW writing for the Guardian. And when Climaquiddick broke, he agreed that there was fire within the smoke and made the point that the damage to the AGW cause from the emails is real.

Today we see him trying mightily to erect a strawman and beat it to death. But he does that after again admitting the problem brought on by the emails but not quite as much as he has in the past. So here is his first of three apparent observations in the wake of the email disclosures:

When you survey the trail of wreckage left by the climate emails crisis, three things become clear. The first is the tendency of those who claim to be the champions of climate science to minimise their importance. Those who have most to lose if the science is wrong have perversely sought to justify the secretive and chummy ethos that some of the emails reveal. If science is not transparent and accountable, it’s not science.

I believe that all supporting data, codes and programmes should be made available as soon as an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. That anyone should have to lodge a freedom of information request to obtain them is wrong. That the request should be turned down is worse. That a scientist suggests deleting material that might be covered by that request is unjustifiable. Everyone who values the scientific process should demand complete transparency, across all branches of science.

I agree completly with his first observation. It is “not science” (and because it has yet to be reproduced, it’s not a theory either) and since the public is funding it, it should – no must – all be out in the open. And that’s doubly true when the so-called “science” is going to be used to make public policy.

Great. Now we come to the strawman:

The second observation is the tendency of those who don’t give a fig about science to maximise their importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

What “canon of climate science?” He admits that the data is unavailable and untested and that those supporting AGW have a tendency to minize the “wreckage”. Then he does exactly that. The person who obviously doesn’t “give a fig about science” is projecting that on those who are skeptical of the “science” – for the very reasons he previously gave. It’s a stunning few paragraphs.

In fact, the skeptics, like all good scientists, actually want to see the science upon which the assertions about climate change are based. You’d think that was the very “canon of science” every person would want to see upheld. His strawman – that skeptics don’t give a fig about the science – is in direct contradiction with the demand of skeptics – let us see the science.

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

But it is not unequivocal, as the disclosure of the emails proves. And there is much controversy concerning the cause of the shrinkage of glaciers and whether the amount of sea ice is declining or increasing. Just recently, one of the favorite AGW claims about the melting snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro has been declared not a result of global warming. And since the temperature data has been shown to have been fudged, that portion of it has never moved beyond hypothesis stage to that of a scientific theory via the scientific method.

And then there’s the bothersome fact that science has said that CO2 is a lagging indicator (by 800 years) and is an “effect” of warming, not a cause. Lastly there’s the exclusion of the sun, cosmic rays and solar wind from these supposedly infallible computer models that have been unable to duplicate the past and have been wrong about the present for at least 10 years. And I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what the earth’s optimum global temperature should be.

Monbiot’s final observation has to do with what he calls the denial industry. He classifies anyone who is “paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening.” He cites four cases where various entities with vested interests in seeing the status quo maintained have paid to have studies done that support their supposition.

Apparently irony free, Monbiot misses completely how the same effect has been achieved through public funding on the AGW side with grants going to those scientists who essentially support the premise of man-made global warming, and little if any money going to those who don’t.

He concludes by calling those who question the science and the cause stooges:

These people haven’t fooled themselves, but they might have fooled you. Who, among those of you who claim that climate scientists are liars and environmentalists are stooges, has thought it through for yourself?

I for one have done exactly that and continue to be very skeptical of the science and especially of the alarmist “industry”. If what Mr. Monbiot presents here is the best case for his side, then I can only say his case is weak and my skepticism is only deepened by it.

President Obama will propose using $200 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to support creating jobs, White House officials confirmed Monday.

The president, in an economic speech before the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, will argue that the money would be well spent by funding projects to build bridges and roads, weatherize homes, and provide other assistance for small businesses as well as the unemployed.

Fund projects to build bridges and roads? I thought that was the purpose of the 787 billion “stimulus”. Shovel ready projects correct? The great and wonderful stimulus, if passed, was guaranteed to keep unemployment at 8% or below, remember? How’s that worked out for us?

And, the funds will come from TARP which was borrowed to begin with. Instead of not spending (and paying back the lenders), we’re now going to create jobs weatherizing homes, oh, and giving “other assistance for small business as well as the unemployed”? It may come as a surprise to the people in Washington DC, but extending unemployment and giving the unemployed other benefits does not create jobs. Nor does some complicated bureaucratic adventure in “weatherizing”.

Initiatives which make the decision to hire and expand easy will do that, and there are none on the horizon. Instead we’ll see another 200 billion added to the 787 billion (yes, friends, a few billion shy of a trillion) on this spending boondoggle that’s worked so well in dampening unemployment.

The dark red CBO shows the actual cost, not the sanitized cost from the White House. This is our future in terms of spending. We’ve certainly seen all the excuses for spending at that level due to the financial crisis (reasons I am still not convinced are necessarily valid), but what are the excuses for the years beyond 2010? And where is that money going to come from?

It is hard to deny this isn’t planned deficit spending on a level we’ve never even contemplated before. You have to wonder how any politician of any stripe could see those budget numbers as doing anything other than worsening a bad situation. The question some are beginning to ask is whether or not this future is based on the naive assumption that government can spend its way out of financial crisis or another thing altogether.

As regular readers know, we’ve been talking about why businesses are sitting on the sidelines and not hiring at the moment. Businesses don’t like unsettled questions about the arena in which they must operate. Health care legislation will effect the cost of doing business. Until that is settled, there’s little incentive to take a chance and hire or expand their business. If it costs more to do so after the legislation is passed – and it seems it will, they’ll wait to see the eventual outcome (and cost) and adjust accordingly. Same with cap-and-trade.

Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

An “endangerment” finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions — even if Congress doesn’t pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.

Bottom line – if the administration can’t get it done legislatively, they’ll just assume the authority and implement what they wish to do to restrict emissions and require “changes in machinery” unilaterally.

An EPA endangerment finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. “The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don’t stifle our economic recovery,” he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.

Can you imagine a more pervasive “emission” or arbitrarily applied set of mandates? Start asking yourself who the favored and unfavored industries are out there? Do you suppose coal fired power plants might be target one? And I’d guess that refiners would be in the same boat – unless they make ethanol.

The point of course is this is a perfect way to target and increase the cost of operating businesses that the EPA decides are the worst CO2 polluters. They’ll just write regulations that require costly renovations and changes. The net outcome, of course, is increased cost to consumers – most likely in their electricity bills, the cost of goods (transportation) and just about every other aspect of life you can imagine.

An endangerment finding would allow the EPA to use the federal Clean Air Act to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, which are produced whenever fossil fuel is burned. Under that law, the EPA could require emitters of as little as 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year to install new technology to curb their emissions starting as soon as 2012.

The EPA has said it will only require permits from big emitters — facilities that put out 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. But that effort to tailor the regulations to avoid slamming small businesses with new costs is expected to be challenged in court.

Legislators are aware that polls show the public appetite for action that would raise energy prices to protect the environment has fallen precipitously amid the recession.

Understanding that the public appetite for such action is very low, legislators are perfectly happy to let cap-and-trade languish. So the bureaucracy is being empowered to go where no elected politician dares at the moment. And if you’re a business, that means you’re still not clear what that means to you at the moment.

And so, you don’t hire. You don’t expand. You’re barely competitive in the global market as it is and now they’re talking about adding more cost? Yeah, that settles everything, doesn’t it? They’ll start hiring tomorrow.

In a London preview of Wall Street’s bonus nightmare, more than 1,000 investment bankers have quit Royal Bank of Scotland to work at rivals due to curbs on their paychecks, according to people familiar with the situation.

In the UK, the rules are modeled after US actions to curb pay at firms bailed out by the government.

[…]

The protest exodus at RBS — first reported on the Web edition of the Times of London — involved less than 5 percent of its banking professionals.

Some headhunters see more bankers jumping ship in the coming year as the controversy deepens over pay freezes and curbs.

Pay people less than they think they can earn elsewhere, then “elsewhere” is where you will find them.

Some will say that these ship-jumpers can’t be worth too much if their companies had to be bailed out, but that gets it exactly backwards. For the most part, it’s those who are responsible for the floundering that will be left working for the rotting (and now government owned) corpse, while those most capable find positions in more stable firms.

There’s nothing particularly bad about this sort of slough off, except that with the bailouts thrown into the mix, it’s the public that’s left holding the bag. Absent the government takeovers, the same sort of thing would have happened, only in a quicker, more orderly way (see, e.g. the fallout from the collapse of Arthur Anderson, or the bankruptcy of BearingPoint).

Moreover, the demonization of Wall Street types accomplishes nothing constructive, and may very well convince otherwise enterprising young B-school grads (or potential grads) to employ their intellectual talents in other fields that may not fully capture their potential or interest. All that does is deprive the rest of us of smart, young and industrious business people who might make our world better, and instead treats us to a glut of some other professionals that we likely don’t need (i.e. lawyers). And we really don’t want that now, do we?